An internet-based product searching service (or “search engine”) allows users to search for products and services offered for sale by manufacturers and retailers. The search service can be deployed as an independent search service website capable of aggregating product information from multiple online merchants, or an internal search engine section for a retailer's website. For simplicity, online or physical store merchants, such as, “retailers,” “manufacturers,” “re-sellers,” “service providers,” and “auction sites” will be used as inter-changeable terms in this disclosure, and are herein referred to as “merchants.” “Products” and “services” are also used inter-changeably for purposes of simplicity in this disclosure, and are herein referred to as “products.”
An end-user can use a client computer to input a search query for a product via a search engine website or the search engine section of a merchant website. The search query is transmitted to a backend computing device for processing. The backend computing device generates a list of search results responsive to the search query by matching each search query to the product information in a product database. The search results are sent to the client computer, and may include hyperlinked product descriptions, images, and/or other interactive information that is responsive to the search query.
Merchants typically design individual webpages for each of their products, and implement software-coded description tags for each product webpage within the merchant website. A search query for product information from a client computing device is matched to one or more product webpages using the description tags of the webpages on a product database. When matching product webpages are identified, the backend computing device generates a search results webpage that includes a list of matching products from the identified webpages. Generally, for each product in the list, the webpage includes a hyperlinked product name (hyperlinked to a product webpage), a product image, and a brief description of the product. The hyperlinked product name is selectable to direct the end-user to the product webpage for more detailed product description.
The product database, which includes such information as the hyperlink information to product webpages, the product names, and brief descriptions of the products, is generated and updated by a software module on a different or the same backend computing device as described above. This product database is stored on the backend computing device for access during the processing of the received search query. A software module generates product data by initiating a data mining operation to automatically mine for product information from various merchant websites. Software agents of the backend computing device may automatically populate the product database by discovering content from product webpages, or a person may manually populate the product database using a product catalog, for example, a web-crawler software agent for tracking webpage changes in internet websites can be used to populate the product database. Exemplary content indexed by a web-crawler includes webpage uniform resource locators (URLs), meta-tags, images, and textual objects.
Traditional product search engines incorrectly derive product information from the web-crawler data. Several aspects of the product information are generally different for each merchant. As an example, merchants offer different product descriptions and product categories to establish a unique website interface. This varied classification of product data across different merchants results in erroneous or conflicting product information when the product data is aggregated by a search.